Many, if not most, companies today keep very sophisticated databases that act as repositories for vast amounts of information on the interactions between those companies and their customers and households of customers. Many of these companies use this information in devising customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns that target specific types of product or service offers to particular types of customers. Among the most recognizable CRM activities are direct-mail and telemarketing campaigns, both of which involve direct communication between a business and its actual or potential customers.
CRM campaigns typically provide benefits to both the company behind the campaign and the customers targeted by the campaign. A well-targeted campaign delivers product and service offers only to those customers who are likely to show interest in the offers. The customer benefits by learning of interesting products or services that might not otherwise have come to light and by receiving some sort of benefit, often in the form of a price discount or free gift, that the general public does not receive. The company benefits by ensuring that the people most likely to purchase its products or services are aware of those products and services and have incentive to purchase them.
Unfortunately, even the most well planned campaigns are not as efficient as they could or should be. One common type of inefficiency is sending duplicate pieces of mail to a customer or to multiple customers in a single household. The customer usually feels frustration in receiving more pieces of mail than are necessary, and the company suffers unnecessary costs in printing and delivering redundant mail. The source of such inefficiency is usually the company's inability to detect that it has multiple database records for one person or for multiple people living in the same household.
Rudimentary database and CRM tools have been developed to attack this and other types of inefficiency by “chaining” together database records corresponding to a single person or a single household. One such tool, developed by NCR Corporation, identifies database records that share one or more common entries—such as a social security number for a customer identified by two different names in the database, or a home address or telephone number for two separate customers living in a single household—and establishes a link between the records so that the records are collectively treated as a single household. These tools, however, useful as they are, still do not address all of the concerns of companies that rely on large databases for campaigns such as these.